Does authentic assessment or the perception of it affect how students study and learn? Does practical experience affect how assessment authenticity is perceived? And does practical experience influence how an authentic assessment affects student learning? Mixed methods design yielded insight into the answers to these questions. This article…

Critical thinking skills are crucial for both academic and everyday life. This paper presents the author's Text Analysis Matrix (TAM), a model for developing skills for the critical examination of texts. The TAM guidelines involve finding and clarifying the main claims of a text, discovering and assessing arguments, uncovering the implications for…

Accurate measures of youth fitness are needed by researchers and practitioners. Evidence of validity and reliability are essential before results of youth fitness tests can be used to make sound decisions. This article describes a three-stage paradigm for validation research and provides guidance for conducting and understanding norm-referenced…

This essay describes how we facilitated the design of a campus leadership team. What is particularly interesting about this consultative project is that both authors participated--one as facilitator and the other as participant. The facilitation included a needs assessment prior to the event, the use of structured controversy techniques,…

Objective: As it is increasingly recognized that cultural competence is an essential quality for any practicing psychiatrist, postgraduate psychiatry training programs need to incorporate cultural competence training into their curricula. This article documents the unique approach to resident cultural competence training being developed in the…

Background: Physical activity holds great promise as a natural and enjoyable setting for learning and for behavioral change. Despite claims that engagement in physical activity can promote socially desired behaviors, there remains a lack of a clear conceptual base that can guide interventions as well as research endeavors in this field. This…

This article uses knowledge management as a framework to analyze the impact of the child and family review process on child protective service agencies. Results of a qualitative analysis of child and family service reviews and program improvement plans indicated that the process has led to an increase in the use of family team meetings and risk…

The major goal of the Council of Europe to promote and facilitate communication and interaction among Europeans of different mother tongues has led to the development of the "Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment" (CEFR). Among other things, the CEFR is intended to help language…

Although explanations are a common means of instruction, research shows that they often do not contribute to learning. To unravel the factors giving rise to the ineffectiveness of instructional explanations, we propose a framework that brings together empirical work on instructional explanations from a variety of research fields, including…

In this paper we argue that video recording of actual practice should be a central tool for organisations attempting to improve services for people with learning disabilities. Since an important site for the disempowerment of service-users is in everyday, mundane interactions with service staff, an approach to staff development is needed which…

Purpose: This paper aims to compare the ways in which a range of quality frameworks have been validated and to identify a number of factors that have an impact on validation processes. Design/methodology/approach: Seven examples of published quality frameworks applicable to the field of e-learning are described and the methods used to validate…

Objective: A nationwide survey of teachers investigated the teaching of food hygiene in UK secondary schools. Previous studies have focused on effective strategies in consumer food hygiene training but there is little research focusing on school-based education. Design: The questionnaire was developed based on the results of in-depth interviews…

Mental retardation (MR) has traditionally been defined as a disorder in intellectual and adaptive functioning beginning in the developmental period. Guided by a federal definition of MR described in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, it is the responsibility of each of the United States to describe eligibility guidelines for special…

Sensory overload and split attention result in reduced learning when instructors read slides with bullet points and complex graphs during a lecture. Conversely, slides containing relevant visual elements, when accompanied by instructor narration, use both the visual and verbal channels of a student's working memory, thus improving the chances of…

This article is based on the premise that face-to-face training can be augmented with cloud-based technology tools, to potentially extend viable training supports as higher education staff and faculty implement new content/skills in their jobs and classrooms. There are significant benefits to harnessing cloud-based tools that can facilitate both…